AI and Education

Illustration generated using DALL·E 2.

The school is dead, long live the school!

Actually, schools are not necessarily the problem, what they teach necessarily is. The traditional schooling system and curriculum it teaches was originally designed to serve the needs of the industrial revolution of the 19th Century; since then not very much has changed.
Not much has changed in the curriculum that is, but there has been a revolution elsewhere. Since the industrial revolution we have learnt to fly, split the atom, landed on the moon and developed the world wide web; and that’s just scratching the surface.

New ways to make a million

Kids as young as 13 can become millionaires by winning a computer games tournament with nothing much more than quick thinking and a flexible pair of thumbs. Others can run successful web based businesses selling things they never paid to manufacture, warehouse or ship, to customers they will never meet or even speak to. Still other individuals can create funny little games in their spare bedroom to be downloaded to a mobile phone and played for free, later to be bought up by a bigger player in the market, sometimes for millions.
The skills required to be successful in any of the aforementioned income generators are not currently taught in our schools, but perhaps they should be. Surely, in a world run by technology, technology should be at the heart of what we teach in schools. I am not suggesting we forego traditional subjects like history, geography, biology etc. but rather harness the possibilities afforded by technology to make them relevant to today’s and tomorrow’s generations.

Dynamic education

Imagine being able to bring history to life for a class using augmented reality, or watch a tornado building and then experience its ferocious power in a geography class. Or how about taking a journey inside the human body in biology or standing at ground zero in physics? And what about exams, surely they are outdated too? Surely children would be better served being shown how to access and validate information through technology that being tested on what they can remember from class?
Perhaps even some subjects will become redundant such as foreign languages other than for personal interest. After all, with advances in natural language processing we now have instant text translation, speech to text and text to speech and even simultaneous translation. Surely time could be better spent perfecting gaming skills, coding, or studying web design than trying to conjugate verbs in a foreign language that a computer could do for you in a millisecond?

Time for a discussion

I know I’m pushing the envelope here, but I really do believe it is time to have a serious discussion about radically changing the curriculum to better ensure the children of today have the skills needed to work in the jobs of tomorrow. After all, they are the ones that will be responsible to paying our pensions, so it’s not just their future, it’s ours too.

Written by Ian Bowie